For those keeping score, the Taiwanese guy whose name I can’t transliterate due to my sad lack of knowledge of Chinese currently has 10850 achievement points. But Zoltan is still very much in the game with 10790; comparing armoury pages it looks as though he was less lucky with some of the random holiday items and with the fishing.

(Edited to add: Longasc points out in comments below that Casperle on EU-Azshara has 10830 achievement points. Not sure who is the top US achiever, anyone know? And is it a coincidence that both the Europeans are on German language servers?)

Or in other words, Taiwanese and European achievement collectors are approximately as nuts as each other. But you have to respect that kind of dedication. From a safe distance.

Zoltan of the EU Aegwynn server has passed 10005 achievement points. As well as a fearful amount of grinding for all the reputations, that involves speed levelling (realm first level 80 dwarf) and some pretty darned hardcore raiding and arena (PvP), including being in the realm first kill of Algalon.

So is he the best WoW player in the world?

It’s an interesting question, because it has never really made sense to ask that of an MMO before. We’ve tended to be focussed on our own servers and communities. We’ve also tended to use our own personal (private) rankings to decide on the best players and guilds on our servers – an achievement-hunting guild could have a terrible local reputation, or an awesome one. You won’t know if you don’t run on that server.

Blizzard has been picking away at this global high score table idea with PvP rankings for arenas for a year or two. After implementing the tournament realms (where you can transfer a character from any server if you want to take part in the big tournament events), and the growth of external PvP events, we had some context in which to discuss the best PvP players and teams. They actually had a chance to fight each other and score points from doing so.

There’s always been some interest in which guilds picked up the world first PvE kills, which servers were the strongest for raiding and/or PvP, and so on. But now, with achievements, there’s a way to simply compare players globally. I’m guessing that for achievement junkies that is part of the appeal.

Either way, it’s an impressive set of achievements. Lunatic, for sure, but impressive. Everyone else, you can stop playing WoW now! This german guy has won the game.